If you do that, you'll be in violation of the custom's laws (which require a proper declaration of the contents of a package). You would probably not get in trouble (being outside the jurisdiction of the Russian gov't, and since you are not shipping contraband), but the recipient might. And if your package was inspected, it would be confiscated. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
If your sites only link to each other, and there are few or no links to them from the outside, then they form an "island". This shouldn't be that hard to detect. Further, if none of the authoritative sites link into the island the credibility of the cross-links isn't high. The Google method isn't quite as easy to spoof as it might sound; I've never been directed to a pr0n site from a Google search. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Your first step is to identify your vibrational modes. For example:
Subwoofer: Assume that you will be protecting against 10 Hz to perhaps 100 Hz
Random shocks: No guess as to the frequency of these.
Figuring out the direction of these vibrations is important. Will they be going from side to side? Up and down? Front to back?
Some of that isn't necessary; you know that the major shocks will be from below (suspension bottoming out), and the heaviest low-frequency vibrations will likely be from the subwoofer (unless you have a REALLY loud exhaust or horrible engine mounts). All you really need to do is build your isolation mount, bolt it to something like a piece of heavy plywood, and test it.
How do you test it? Give it vibrations and shocks. If it can sit on top of your subwoofer without causing any errors, and if you can handle several G's of shock load from below (like you'd get from hitting the far side of a really bad pothole, after the car has had a chance to fall down into it), it should do. The shock-load testing can probably be done with a drop test.
The really interesting part is the suspension design. Your side loads will probably never get up to 1 G, so the mount can be very compliant in that direction. Ditto fore/aft, unless you make a habit of running into things with your car. A compliant mount will have a very low resonant frequency, and will transmit very little force from the vehicle to the drive. From below is different; you need to handle a constant 1G force and possibly spikes of 5G for short intervals (a few inches of travel) without bottoming out and shocking the drive. You probably want to use foam rubber for this. Make it in blocks separated slightly, so they can bend back and forth more easily than they crush. Use enough thickness of sufficiently stiff foam that 10 G's (ten times the drive weight) doesn't crush the foam all the way down, and make sure that turning the mount sideways (1 G side force) doesn't let the drive hit any of the sides either. Don't forget cooling requirements, and a heater to bring the drive up to a reasonable temperature before firing it up after a cold-soak is a really good idea.
I like the idea of the auto-spec CD-ROM drive; all those details are already taken care of for you. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
After all, there are plenty of huge conglomerates out there that make profits day in and day out, yet we never really hear about them because they play fair.
Most people have never heard about the lobbying of Archer Daniels Midland either, and the ethanol-fuel subsidy was pretty much written to their specifications (10% ethanol fuel avoids the full Federal gasoline tax, so the subsidy amounts to about $1.90/gallon of ethanol). The problem is that the mechanics of fuel taxes are too complicated for most people to understand, and they don't care because it hardly affects them at the pump. It cheats them indirectly (worse roads, more soil erosion in the corn belt, more emissions from fertilizer and pesticide companies) but that's really hard to get worked up about unless they are dedicated activists.
Contrast that with the way Napster and DeCSS hit lots of consumers directly (already, or potentially) and it's not hard to see how some corporate welfare gets under the popular radar while other stuff sticks out like a sore thumb. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
These companies have only one purpose. They are run by coalitions of analysts, stockholders, investors and executives whose overriding mission is to mass-market products, dominate markets and -- in the end -- maximize profits. There isn't a single CEO of a major corporation who wouldn't get fired in a flash if he or she decided to forego profits in favor of workers or community.
I've noticed that Lucent Technology's stock slide hasn't had any repercussions up at the level of the CEO's office. Face it, there is a lot of bumbling going on, especially in large organizations where a hundred left hands can live in total ignorance of what the right hand is doing. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Under the current interpretation of the constitution, a fetus is NOT a human being, else abortion, even the pill, would be illegal, and a miscarriage would be manslaughter.
That doesn't follow. No human being has the right to use a body of another against the other's will (absent conviction of a crime, I think). Granting a fetus or embryo the right to use someone else's body is a huge logical leap, and a denial of rights to the person whose body is made to play host without consent.
Which is why various jurisdictions are having trouble trouble prosecuting alcoholic expectant mothers for child abuse.
It's a pity that the Supremes created a "right to reproduce", because mandatory contraception (Depo Provera, Norplant, tubal ligation) would be a much cheaper and more effective preventative measure against e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome than is the threat of jail. I know that there have been judgements against chemical companies etc. for creating conditions which led to harm to babies not even conceived when the tort was committed, and this falls into the same area. --
How about you explain it to the families of the hundreds of people per year that get there heads blown off just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when either a deal went bad or some crack head decided he needed some cash to get his next fix...
Alcohol is legal (and regulated) in the USA. How many people get their heads blown off each year because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when a sale went bad or when an alcoholic started getting the DT's and badly needed some cash to get a drink?
The only method I can think of to avoid having this happen would be to take it underground. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a private, invitation only VPN.
"Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." If one person can be threatened by contempt-of-court charges or trumped up criminal charges into revealing the identities of the other people in the network, it's over. The only way you can make this work is to keep things fully anonymous.
It sucks, I know. But this is the way it is at the moment, and the way it will continue to be until the public gets outraged by something and DEMANDS that the corporations admit that people have rights and leave them alone. What could do that? I dunno, how about a utility to store DVD's on a hard drive so that kids can play "The Lion King" whenever they want without trashing the expensive disk? How many parents would just LOVE that? How much sympathy would there be for the MPAA and Disney if they went after the people who gave it to the public? That's the kind of thing to go for. --
The only theoretical gateway (which would just serve as an info dropping zone for legitimate users) would be something to the effect of a gopher server with lots of "unauthorized access will be prosecuted"s all over the place.
If you think that a court will believe that access pursuant to a subpoena for information for a lawsuit will fall under the "unauthorized" category, think again. These huge firms have tons of money for subpoenas and laywers. What do you have? They can bankrupt you before you can get in a motion to dismiss.
The only way to keep information out of the hands of these mega-corps is to keep it from existing in the first place. In this situation, we want information to be anything but free. --
Hiding, will give the enemy amunition that you are hiding, therefore knowing it's wrong.
Ammunition, perhaps, but the general claim is false. Knowing that something is wrong is very different from knowing that you can be harassed, even bankrupted, for doing it. The trumped-up charges and outrageous bail demands for protesters in Philadelphia last month show that the price of merely gathering to petition the government for redress of grievances is being raised beyond what most people can pay. The powers-that-be have the entire resources of the government to bring to bear against the few people who put their faces forward, and they do this with the intent of shutting off that part of the political process. When they play hardball, going anonymous is a legitimate response.
The outrageous distortions and outright lies used to demonize software such as DeCSS, combined with the sledgehammer tactics against the people who dared distribute it or merely talk about it, proves that the system is grossly broken. There are people who want to go around it until and unless it is fixed. Anonymity is a good way to do that, and I fully support them. --
Bingo. With the DMCA, the fair-use rights to space-shift, time-shift and archive have apparently been tossed out the window by the trial courts )in the first round). No telling if it will be reversed on appeal, but we can hope. --
The hell with petitions. Write your congresscritter, and send money to any lobbying organization trying to do something about the probem. Remember the article about geeks being unsophisticated about how the world works? Look in the mirror. --
I hate to pick nits so much, but this is a very different class of problem from the one your techniques are suitable for.
The problem is that as soon as you have wires leading into and out of the shell, your shell becomes almost completely ineffective. You'd have great trouble avoiding this, as you need things like power cables entering the computer.
That's only for RF leakage. The problem in this case appears to be 60 Hz magnetic field interference (which causes monitors to shake at the difference between the line frequency and the scan rate, among other things). A penetrating power cable will do a good job of carrying 300 MHz RF interference, but it won't carry any 60 Hz magnetic fields at all because it's made of copper and not ferromagnetic.
There are a couple of effects that work in your favour for this. Firstly, the high frequency components of the noise won't diffract around *too* much.
They won't diffract at all, they are in the "near field" (wavelength at 60 Hz is five thousand kilometers!). Second, there probably aren't significant high-frequency components beyond 300 Hz or so (magnetic non-linearities create them from 60 Hz, but not all that much). What really works in your favor is that you can put something between you and the compressor motors which allows the magnetic fields to flow back without going any further into space. The emissions from a 2-pole motor drop off as 1/r^3, emissions from a 4-pole drop off at 1/r^4. If you put a ferromagnetic cage around the motor the induced field will set up opposite image fields and raise the exponent even higher. Get it to 1/r^6 and you probably won't have problems with monitors shaking any more. You'll still have trouble with switching transients from the compressors turning on and off, so use a surge protector, line filter, UPS or ferroresonant transformer to eat them. --
I'm not sure... would a steel mesh also work for this?
No. What you are trying to do is short-circuit the magnetic fields emitted by the motors (which is mostly at 60 Hz). This requires a path of high magnetic permeability. The permeability of steel isn't that much higher than air, and a lot of flux will go right through a steel mesh. You absolutely need something like plate. At high frequencies you can use the image currents induced by the applied time-varying field to shield the field with only a mesh, but the image currents decay exponentially with time and the resistance of steel is too high to give good cancellation at such low frequencies with mesh.
New thought: make a hollow form which goes around the motor, out of plywood or whatever. Fill it with steel shot. This allows you to create a shield of almost arbitrary shape (how many ways can you glue thin plywood?) and it is certainly cheap.
(Don't bother modding me up unless you think this really rates a +3 for visibility, I'm above the karma cap. Post instead.) --
If you have any access to the chiller room at all, the best thing to do would be to shield the chiller compressors and any other motors in that room. A solid steel cage is good, mu metal is better (but very expensive). Shielding the problem right at the source means you will be covering a lot less area, and it will probably cost you a lot less money.
I can think of ways to do this with active cancellation, but it's not something that I've ever heard of being available off the shelf and I doubt you want to get into the magnetic flux abatement R&D business. --
If Word had a proper security sandbox setup, it could be extended to privacy as well. Neither viruses nor HREFs should cause accesses to anything without permission of the user. Bye-bye, web bug.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't believe in security models. --
Three paragraphs of non-sequitur followed by a falsehood. Wow. You have either not had your coffee this morning, or had too much.
You don't give a nuclear reactor to a third-world country. This much is obvious, for a number of reasons. What's less obvious is that we give more than we need to ourselves...why not? It's only a matter of convenience. The simple answer: when we all take more than we need, everyone is shafted.
When we created the telegraph to move information faster than by carrying pieces of paper with marks on them, was that "more than we need"?
How about when we created the telephone to transmit information as sound instead of transcribing it to paper (and moving many times the bandwidth of the telegraph), was that "more than we need"?
Now we're in an age of ADSL lines, cable modems and megabit satellite links. One DSL line can carry information equivalent to several voice channels, and cable modems crank at Ethernet speeds (albeit shared). It's all using existing infrastructure. When did using some of that become taking "more than we need"?
Some hundreds of millions of years ago, plants learned how to conserve water and fend off deadly solar radiation. They came out of the seas and took over the land. When did they start taking more than they needed? Hell, it was there, and there was sunlight going to waste just like there's bandwidth going to waste in just about every fiber-optic strand in the world. We're not "wasting" anything by refusing to be limited to 300 BPS modems and 20 megabyte 14-inch hard drives; if anything, we are conserving by getting more and more out of less and less. This isn't waste or selfishness, it is the exact opposite.
A PalmVx has enough storage capacity to keep track of all the things you will ever do for the rest of your life in text. Your 20 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP has enough storage space to keep track of just about anything in the correct (read: simplest) format. When everyone has this data stored on a local drive, the situation isn't that big of a deal...the consequences are internalized. When we all share a fixed space, like the net, then there's a problem.
[emphasis added] Maybe I'd like to use a Palm to do more than track what I want to do. Maybe I want to play games on it, read books (with pictures) on it, and listen to music on it. Maybe I want to use something like a Palm (and maybe a headset) to supplement or replace my personal stereo, my pager, cell phone, GPS, bicycle trip computer, and even my laptop machine. So I do more with less mass, bulk and energy; where's this taking more than I need? And since when is the Internet "a fixed space", anyway? It's grown by orders of magnitude in the last ten years, and more orders of magnitude are in the offing.
There is no such thing as a fat or thin pipe. Take my Coke as an example.
I'll take it unless you spit in it.
Obviously, there are limitations on the acceptable width of the straw in the can. It has to be fat enough to allow passage of the soda (pop in Canada) with surface tension taken into effect. It has to be thin enough to fit in my mouth. Other than that, the straw's effectiveness depends on how hard one sucks.
Har. The flow of Coke is limited by the atmospheric pressure and the viscosity of the fluid (Classic will flow slower than Diet). Once you have a full vacuum on your end of the straw (possible, considering the weakness of your arguments!;-) the Coke cannot flow any faster no matter how fast you can drink; the only way to get Coke faster is to have a fatter pipe. There is more than one thing you might want to push through a pipe, too. If you want to move the water for a block-full of houses, you need a fat pipe. If you tried moving it through a straw, three things would happen:
The straw would explode due to the driving pressure exceeding the hoop strength of the plastic.
If the straw were made of steel instead, the power requirements of the pump would quickly "take more than you needed" to move the water.
Somewhere as pressures increased, the water would be delivered at boiling or hotter. The energy put in by the pump is dissipated as friction, and that heats both the water and the pipe.
Sooner or later you need a fatter pipe, QED. Arguments to the contrary... suck.;-) --
If you have to have a license for hunting, fishing, and driving, why not for I2?
What happens to the ability of people to use the Internet for speech where anonymity is important (whistleblowing, unpopular political causes, etc.) when every posting requires one's license to be checked? There isn't an infrastructure for this, and any such infrastructure could and would be abused to silence critics of the people in power. When you have examples of the lack of freedom in front of you, and the importance of a free Internet for tearing down the oppressive regimes (Iran, China, N. Korea), I'm shocked that you would even consider such a thing.
If institutions have codes of conduct for access to I2 (like Usenet2), that's fine; people could always set up Internet3, Internet4, etc. ad infinitum if they didn't like the rules. But it shouldn't be a government deal. --
PHB types would keep pushing the power flux (power per unit area) higher and higher
I believe that the power flux is limited by thermal blooming and defocussing effects which appear at higher power densities. If the PHB's tried running things higher and the financial guys weren't smart enough to stop them, their stuff would start messing up, they'd lose money and they'd wind up unemployed. --
An SE is an external combustion engine, like a steam engine - however, it works on temperature differentials, not just on heat...
You're just restating the obvious. Every heat engine requires a heat sink; see the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Worse, you're trying to lecture someone who does thermodynamics for fun.
Helium is a desirable working fluid for Stirling engines because monatomic gases have a polytropic gas law exponent k of 5/3 (polytropic gas law states that P*v^k = constant for an adiabatic expansion or compression, where P is pressure and v is volume per unit mass). The exponent for a diatomic gas at room temperature is 7/5 (1.4). The consequence of this is that helium heats and cools much more for a given expansion or compression, and can operate over a broader delta-T for the same ratio of volumes.
A machine operating in a steady state, steady flow regime (like a turbine) will tend to be quiet compared to a machine which does not. However, this doesn't necessarily make it more efficient. Even large steam turbines are hard-put to get 35% system efficiency, while an every-day Cummins B5.9 diesel gets as good as 0.32 lbm/HP-hr BSFC which I believe translates to about 41% thermal efficiency. --
You obviously know Your chemistry. But apparently not a whole lot about economics, ecology and sociology.
Sociology says that people will tend to go for the least effort-intensive solution to their perceived problem. Economics says that people go for the lowest cost in a free market. Ecology doesn't have much different to say; organisms tend to gravitate toward niches where living takes the least effort (which includes fending off competition and predation).
My point is that people will do the same old thing unless they feel a need (economic, moral, or otherwise) to change. People have many needs, and energy is only one of the many competitors for their efforts. The least-effort method of generating electricity leaves more time and money available for other pursuits, and is ipso facto the preferred one. The need is to properly price electricity according to the impacts of its source (internalizing the externalities), and then the problem will take care of itself. The problem is that properly pricing the externalities is a political can of worms of titanic proportions.
Uranium (and whatever else they choose to stick in those Nuclear generators) and oil ARE of limited supply,
I ran a calculation a while ago, and even at enormously increased rates of use we have literally centuries of uranium left and at least a millennium of thorium. In contrast, we have a problem with global warming right NOW. Technology for the positively-renewables isn't quite here yet, so nukes are a great way of cutting the damage in the meantime. --
Slashdot Mirror
If you do that, you'll be in violation of the custom's laws (which require a proper declaration of the contents of a package). You would probably not get in trouble (being outside the jurisdiction of the Russian gov't, and since you are not shipping contraband), but the recipient might. And if your package was inspected, it would be confiscated.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
If your sites only link to each other, and there are few or no links to them from the outside, then they form an "island". This shouldn't be that hard to detect. Further, if none of the authoritative sites link into the island the credibility of the cross-links isn't high. The Google method isn't quite as easy to spoof as it might sound; I've never been directed to a pr0n site from a Google search.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
How do you test it? Give it vibrations and shocks. If it can sit on top of your subwoofer without causing any errors, and if you can handle several G's of shock load from below (like you'd get from hitting the far side of a really bad pothole, after the car has had a chance to fall down into it), it should do. The shock-load testing can probably be done with a drop test.
The really interesting part is the suspension design. Your side loads will probably never get up to 1 G, so the mount can be very compliant in that direction. Ditto fore/aft, unless you make a habit of running into things with your car. A compliant mount will have a very low resonant frequency, and will transmit very little force from the vehicle to the drive. From below is different; you need to handle a constant 1G force and possibly spikes of 5G for short intervals (a few inches of travel) without bottoming out and shocking the drive. You probably want to use foam rubber for this. Make it in blocks separated slightly, so they can bend back and forth more easily than they crush. Use enough thickness of sufficiently stiff foam that 10 G's (ten times the drive weight) doesn't crush the foam all the way down, and make sure that turning the mount sideways (1 G side force) doesn't let the drive hit any of the sides either. Don't forget cooling requirements, and a heater to bring the drive up to a reasonable temperature before firing it up after a cold-soak is a really good idea.
I like the idea of the auto-spec CD-ROM drive; all those details are already taken care of for you.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Contrast that with the way Napster and DeCSS hit lots of consumers directly (already, or potentially) and it's not hard to see how some corporate welfare gets under the popular radar while other stuff sticks out like a sore thumb.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
I rest my case.
--
It sucks, I know. But this is the way it is at the moment, and the way it will continue to be until the public gets outraged by something and DEMANDS that the corporations admit that people have rights and leave them alone. What could do that? I dunno, how about a utility to store DVD's on a hard drive so that kids can play "The Lion King" whenever they want without trashing the expensive disk? How many parents would just LOVE that? How much sympathy would there be for the MPAA and Disney if they went after the people who gave it to the public? That's the kind of thing to go for.
--
The only way to keep information out of the hands of these mega-corps is to keep it from existing in the first place. In this situation, we want information to be anything but free.
--
The outrageous distortions and outright lies used to demonize software such as DeCSS, combined with the sledgehammer tactics against the people who dared distribute it or merely talk about it, proves that the system is grossly broken. There are people who want to go around it until and unless it is fixed. Anonymity is a good way to do that, and I fully support them.
--
Better be sure to cover your tracks, then. Remember Jon Johansen!
--
Bingo. With the DMCA, the fair-use rights to space-shift, time-shift and archive have apparently been tossed out the window by the trial courts )in the first round). No telling if it will be reversed on appeal, but we can hope.
--
The hell with petitions. Write your congresscritter, and send money to any lobbying organization trying to do something about the probem. Remember the article about geeks being unsophisticated about how the world works? Look in the mirror.
--
Your asterisks aren't lining up with the appropriate text. Next time, use the and tags to format in a monospace font.
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--
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New thought: make a hollow form which goes around the motor, out of plywood or whatever. Fill it with steel shot. This allows you to create a shield of almost arbitrary shape (how many ways can you glue thin plywood?) and it is certainly cheap.
(Don't bother modding me up unless you think this really rates a +3 for visibility, I'm above the karma cap. Post instead.)
--
I can think of ways to do this with active cancellation, but it's not something that I've ever heard of being available off the shelf and I doubt you want to get into the magnetic flux abatement R&D business.
--
Of course, Microsoft doesn't believe in security models.
--
How about when we created the telephone to transmit information as sound instead of transcribing it to paper (and moving many times the bandwidth of the telegraph), was that "more than we need"?
Now we're in an age of ADSL lines, cable modems and megabit satellite links. One DSL line can carry information equivalent to several voice channels, and cable modems crank at Ethernet speeds (albeit shared). It's all using existing infrastructure. When did using some of that become taking "more than we need"?
Some hundreds of millions of years ago, plants learned how to conserve water and fend off deadly solar radiation. They came out of the seas and took over the land. When did they start taking more than they needed? Hell, it was there, and there was sunlight going to waste just like there's bandwidth going to waste in just about every fiber-optic strand in the world. We're not "wasting" anything by refusing to be limited to 300 BPS modems and 20 megabyte 14-inch hard drives; if anything, we are conserving by getting more and more out of less and less. This isn't waste or selfishness, it is the exact opposite.
[emphasis added] Maybe I'd like to use a Palm to do more than track what I want to do. Maybe I want to play games on it, read books (with pictures) on it, and listen to music on it. Maybe I want to use something like a Palm (and maybe a headset) to supplement or replace my personal stereo, my pager, cell phone, GPS, bicycle trip computer, and even my laptop machine. So I do more with less mass, bulk and energy; where's this taking more than I need? And since when is the Internet "a fixed space", anyway? It's grown by orders of magnitude in the last ten years, and more orders of magnitude are in the offing. I'll take it unless you spit in it. Har. The flow of Coke is limited by the atmospheric pressure and the viscosity of the fluid (Classic will flow slower than Diet). Once you have a full vacuum on your end of the straw (possible, considering the weakness of your arguments!- The straw would explode due to the driving pressure exceeding the hoop strength of the plastic.
- If the straw were made of steel instead, the power requirements of the pump would quickly "take more than you needed" to move the water.
- Somewhere as pressures increased, the water would be delivered at boiling or hotter. The energy put in by the pump is dissipated as friction, and that heats both the water and the pipe.
Sooner or later you need a fatter pipe, QED. Arguments to the contrary... suck.--
If institutions have codes of conduct for access to I2 (like Usenet2), that's fine; people could always set up Internet3, Internet4, etc. ad infinitum if they didn't like the rules. But it shouldn't be a government deal.
--
(The karma limit is now 50, so unless and until it is removed you're wasting your time.)
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Helium is a desirable working fluid for Stirling engines because monatomic gases have a polytropic gas law exponent k of 5/3 (polytropic gas law states that P*v^k = constant for an adiabatic expansion or compression, where P is pressure and v is volume per unit mass). The exponent for a diatomic gas at room temperature is 7/5 (1.4). The consequence of this is that helium heats and cools much more for a given expansion or compression, and can operate over a broader delta-T for the same ratio of volumes.
A machine operating in a steady state, steady flow regime (like a turbine) will tend to be quiet compared to a machine which does not. However, this doesn't necessarily make it more efficient. Even large steam turbines are hard-put to get 35% system efficiency, while an every-day Cummins B5.9 diesel gets as good as 0.32 lbm/HP-hr BSFC which I believe translates to about 41% thermal efficiency.
--
My point is that people will do the same old thing unless they feel a need (economic, moral, or otherwise) to change. People have many needs, and energy is only one of the many competitors for their efforts. The least-effort method of generating electricity leaves more time and money available for other pursuits, and is ipso facto the preferred one. The need is to properly price electricity according to the impacts of its source (internalizing the externalities), and then the problem will take care of itself. The problem is that properly pricing the externalities is a political can of worms of titanic proportions.
I ran a calculation a while ago, and even at enormously increased rates of use we have literally centuries of uranium left and at least a millennium of thorium. In contrast, we have a problem with global warming right NOW. Technology for the positively-renewables isn't quite here yet, so nukes are a great way of cutting the damage in the meantime.--